President Obama visited Pope Francis at the Vatican. He said the pope's message challenged him and others on economic and social issues, but focused his remarks largely on the former, where the two have more in common.

Senate Democrats worried about their party's prospects in the November midterms are planning on introducing "principles" and legislation to fix Obamacare.

Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) says the George Washington Bridge scandal he's been embroiled in since the beginning of the year isn't changing his thinking on running for president, but that he doesn't want to make a decision until the last possible moment.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has signed a peace deal with the government of the Philippines. MILF is the largest Muslim rebel group in the country.

The Wu Tang Clan plans to press just one copy of its "secret album" Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, take it on tour, and then try to sell it for seven figures.

A new dwarf planet discovered in the inner Oort Cloud is renewing speculation about a giant Planet X beyond the orbit of Pluto.

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I keep hearing that. Even Limbaugh says it. But is it? I mean, this would mean it had to be designed this way in the first place which makes little sense to me. Meanwhile, the left seems to have concluded the GOP made this mess and so there’s no option but SP.

Weird.

I suppose the ‘natural’ next step is single payer but can it mean something else?

It doesn’t matter WHY it failed. They will blame the “market”, especially given the Orwellian “marketplaces” name given to the government-run exchanges. I think they just want single payer, period. Inch by inch, they want to get there.

I think what can really stop this is a full repeal of the ACA, but neither party is going to do it.

I suppose the ‘natural’ next step is single payer but can it mean something else?

Depends. Even if shitlibs use the fact that the ACA is a crapfest as a way to argue that single payer should be installed, they never actually say how we’re going to pay for it or how it will affect the current infrastructure for training doctors. Medicare and Medicaid together both cost well north of $1 trillion, and that’s only going to get worse as the baby boomers increase the retired population. Medicare is already cash-poor and its shortfalls are covered by the same “trust fund” that covers SS shortfalls–current Treaury bonds (debt) are sold to cover any unfunded obligations.

Current single payer systems “work” only in the sense that they’ve been operating for around 50-60 years now. If the US was going to establish one, it would have been at the end of WW2 when every other country was installing those systems. I suspect the limits of scale would make any implentation here a bigger PITA than ACA.

Gina Barger was arrested on March 19, 2014 after she failed to appear in court on a theft charge. She was taken to the Marion County Jail, where she developed a problem with one of her toes. She was taken from the women’s cell block to the infirmary, but was returned to the men’s cell block.

According to her mother, Roxanna, Gina called her in a panic. “Mom, I went to medical to have my toe fixed, when they brought me back, they brought me into a man’s cell block and I’m with complete men,” Gina said.

Honestly, expecting a correctional officer to think, “hmm, we’ve never put a woman in the men’s block,” is too much. $28k/year to work in the worst of places buys you people who literally can’t find another way to make $14/hr.

I believe “right” and “left” are, at their base, descriptions of the general attitude toward hierarchy. If you believe that economic inequality is good or maybe that it’s simply inevitable so live with it, then that’s right wing. If you believe economic inequality is bad and want to do away with it somehow, then that’s left wing.

You don’t often find a lefty/proggy who doesn’t firmly believe that we can replace current petro-vehicles with electric ones. But apparantly anarcho-fascist wing of the movement is, dare I say, skeptical of this article of faith?

In the versions outside the US there is one point where somebody does refer to the Clint Eastwood character as “Manco” – a Spanish word for somebody with a wounded hand (with other connotations). Unfortunately, in Japanese this word is most commonly used for “pussy” (nothing to do with cats).

Biggest losers of the Internet. Seriously, you have a 100+ year tradition, and in about 2 weeks you are completely destroyed by the fact, even more ironically completely antithetical to your movement, that the Internet is for porn.

Come this fall, there will be plenty of beer and football inside the new Levi’s Stadium, but don’t expect to tap your own keg, toss a football, play a bugle, spill any substance, or bring your pet Gila monster to any San Francisco 49ers games or Super Bowl L.

New preliminary regulations set for approval at tonight’s Santa Clara City Council meeting offer a long list of taboo items and behavior, in what is a preliminary draft for public debate prior to the official adoption of the ordinance before the “Field of Jeans'” first event August 2nd.

If nothing else, the vuvuzela proves that no one who attends a soccer game really cares about anything more than being loud and rowdy and getting piss drunk and.fighting. fucking watch thr game people rolling on the ground in faux agony, people.

Virtually everyone outside of South Africa deplores vuvuzelas. American children are an exception. Most American soccer fans would prefer to wrap those annoying fucking plastic horns around the kids’ necks, but most American soccer fans aren’t total assholes.

When I was in junior high we had a tyrannical French-Canadian bus driver. The bus tool kids from two schools – one from the English and the other the French. We usually kept to ourselves with the odd jab and jokes but we didn’t really fight like other places.

But, kids being kids, we were excited. The bus driver had a ZERO tolerance policy against….talking. And if he caught someone talking he’d get in their grill or even kick them off the bus.

My point is that shit can only last so long. Like the “passionate” sports coach. Eventually, shit hits the fan. And it did. Funny thing is, after that, we never saw him again.

Chicago-based Ribbeck Law has filed a petition for discovery against Boeing Co, manufacturer of the aircraft, and Malaysian Airlines, operator of the plane in a Cook County, Illinois Circuit Court. The petition is meant to secure evidence of possible design and manufacturing defects that may have contributed to the disaster, the law firm said.

Though both Boeing and Malaysian Airlines were named in the filing, the focus of the case will be on Boeing, Ribbeck’s lawyers told reporters, as they believe that the incident was caused by mechanical failure.

The petition was filed on behalf of Januari Siregar, a lawyer who had known Ribbeck’s staff when working on a case involving Garuda Indonesia a few years earlier, Ribbeck said.

The firm said he was the uncle of Firman Chandra Siregar, a passenger on the flight, and legal representative for his family, correcting an earlier press release that had stated he was the passenger’s father.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Tool put that out there just to fuck with people. Seems to be their MO. I think that before their last album came out they circulated a fake list of song titles to confuse fan sites.

I had a rat in my basement 20 years ago, so I bought a rat trap. He took the bait and the trap clamped down on his waist. He just stood up and pulled it down like it was a pair of shorts and ran away. Ghetto rats are tough motherfuckers.

Family considerations also motivated Cohen. He wanted to protect his older son, Devon, a high school freshman who is determined to join SAE in college. Devon wears bow ties in purple and gold — SAE’s colors — and knows its secret handshake.

“I don’t want him to be scarred mentally from hazing,” said Brad Cohen, relaxing with his family in their home near Los Angeles. “I don’t want him to want to join SAE so badly that he’ll do anything he’s told.”

I understand why fraternities haze. Psychologically if people don’t have to suffer or pay a price to get into an organization, they won’t value membership.

That said, I have no idea why anyone puts up with the various bullshit fraternities dish out. Yeah, I know it is a great way to get laid. But everyone gets laid in college and even if you don’t, getting laid isn’t that great.

I knew a guy in college whose brother went to some weirdo private school in New England and allegedly had to fuck a cow to get into the fraternity. Even the frats I was familiar with expected some real weirdo and frankly gay shit from the pledges (NTTAWWT). I never got the mentality of the person who wanted to put themselves through that. And every single person I knew who did, was bored with it and living in an apartment on their own by the time they were seniors.

Pre-1980, it made a lot more sense. When most college kids couldn’t have their own phone, and meeting women on campus was harder. But yeah, even in the 1990s, I didn’t understand what they would be bringing me that I couldn’t get on my own.

AD, thanks for that consuming debate. It was a good one. Lotsa people chimed in.

I’d like to add, ahem…TSN’s player power ranking maintains Crosby at #1 by a decent margin – again. I looked at the list of players below him and thought about you. I just can’t see how any are better.

That last part is true, I pretty much abandoned my fraternity my senior year. By that point the school’s attitude towards fraternities had gone from supportive and encouraging to outright hostility so most of the perks of membership were gone. My pledgeship wasn’t what I would call easy but the older brothers never made us do any of the really gay/dangerous shit you hear about. Probably because we were a single letter chapter of one of the oldest fraternities.

“But everyone gets laid in college and even if you don’t, getting laid isn’t that great.”

They do? This is news to me.

Course being a Physics major on a campus dedicated to Math, Science, and Business majors so there were like 8 guys for every girl (all the girls were cross town at the nursing & liberal arts schools) at a commuter school (only about 20% of the students lived on campus in dorms, the rest drove in) probably impacted that some but still none the only instance of any of the guys I knew having sex would have been called rape today.

All of that doesn’t begin to address the supposedly “fierce urgency of now” that demanded a top-down, command-economy government program to deal with the estimated 40 million Americans without insurance who should have flooded the system looking for coverage.

If this system works as well as the Obama administration insists, where are all of the uninsured? Why haven’t we seen massive numbers of enrollments from the beginning if that was such a crisis as to require the kind of intervention Democrats imposed, at an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion dollars over the next ten years?

That is the real joke, and it’s on us. Don’t expect us to laugh about it. Instead, we should double our efforts to jettison the jokers who are responsible for it.

Those IT threads look amusing. I’m gonna have to get a satellite dish or something. Also, since I was on a full (academic) scholarship as an undergrad, does that now mean that I was an employee of my university? Where the fuck is my pension, Ohio State?

This week is Sunshine Week in Washington, a designation made 10 years ago to promote transparency in government operations and how tax dollars are spent.

It’s an attempt to force federal agencies to release information on where the $4 trillion budget is really spent ? and Open the Books will release a new report on corporate welfare payments to the Fortune 100 companies from 2000 to 2012.

Over that period, the 100 received $1.2 trillion in payments from the federal government.

That number does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in housing, bank and auto company bailouts in 2008 and 2009, because those payments and where they went are kept mostly invisible in the federal agency books.

Every cloud has a golden lining! California’s three-year drought prompts new gold rush in same hills that drew fortune seekers in the 1880s

Low water levels have led to a mini gold rush in the Sierra Nevada foothills Same area that drew fortune seekers in the mid-1800s Gold rush from December – January saw amateurs dig for riverbed riches Lack of water means miners try to get to the bedrock where the best gold is

“The Coalition of African American Pastors, a group of conservative, black men of the cloth, say Attorney General Eric Holder ought to be impeached for his stance on gay marriage laws….

“”If Obama was a white man, he would be impeached,” said Rev. William Owens, the group’s founder and president, in The Hill. “Obama has been given a free pass to do what he pleases, but I don’t give him a pass. I’m very black, been black all my life. He doesn’t get a pass. I don’t give him a pass.””

McStupid? Norwegian teen has his McDonald’s dinner receipt tattooed on his ARM for a dare… and his dad’s locked him out as a result

Stian Ytterdahl tattooed the receipt from his McDonald’s visit The 18-year-old did it as ‘punishment’ for his success with the ladies Mr Ytterdahl, thought it was better than the alternative – a Barbie doll

I’m gonna guess that one job that may be in demand in the near future are tattoo removal specialists. Getting a tattoo seems to be a fad and I reckon a good chunk of those people may regret their decision. Just my impression.

As long as there are people who think every brainfart is worth tweeting or posting, there will be someone who thinks at least one of those brainfarts deserves a permanent record for the edification of total strangers.

I too think Tatoo’s are stupid but I am not so sure that they will go away this time.

Usually fads like tattoo’s come and go in 10 ish year cycles, this one has been going on for close to 20 and shows no real sign of fading. The fad also is usually tied to general economic conditions, more prosperity and economic confidence usually leads to a more experimental social sphere less economic prosperity and confidence leads to a more conservative social sphere. The current tattoo fad has survived 2 economic crashes and a prolonged economic slump.

Normally by this point people worried about finances should have started normalizing and homogenizing their appearance and eschewing individualized things like tattoos out of fear that they would harm job prospects a long time ago, certainly by 2010 but it hasn’t happened and if it hangs on for another decade then the last of the boomers will be out of power, Gen X’ers will be starting to retire and a much more socially tolerant group of millenials who realistically won’t care about employees with tats will be taking power.

Usually fads like tattoo’s come and go in 10 ish year cycles, this one has been going on for close to 20 and shows no real sign of fading.

The current fashion started off as an emulation of rock stars and rappers, and now that just about every professional athlete and celebrity seems to have ink of some kind, it’s not going away for a good long while. Count me in as one of those who think most tats are ridiculous.

This is going to be one of those phenomena that’s studied as part of American history courses just because it’s lasted so damn long. And yeah, whoever invents and patents a method to easily remove tats like you’d wash off paint is going to end up leaving behind massively wealthy heirs to be wastes of space on reality TV shows.

In fairness, he didn’t have far to fall. If the Republicans were anything but sad sack losers, they would put together a 30 second mic of Harry’s greatest hits and then at the end have a voice over saying

“A vote for a Democratic Senator in November is really a vote for this man to be majority leader”

I always thought he was a sharp-elbowed hack and an unprincipled douche, but in the last month he has called the Koch brothers UnAmerican, accused the GOP of facilitating the annexation of Crimea, and now he thinks America doesn’t know how to use the Internet. Ye gods.

The Federal Election Commission has sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s campaign, asking for more information on why he listed an expenditure of more than $16,000 in “holiday gifts.”

The gifts, I have learned, were purchased from his granddaughter, Ryan Elisabeth Reid, who is a jewelry vendor in Berkeley, CA. The gifts were later passed on to donors and supporters, a Reid spokeswoman told me.

Yup, that would have been a tall order. I remember that the population of the entire state didn’t top a half million people until the late 70’s. Hard to imagine doing business of any kind there without rubbing elbows with some dude transplated from the east coast to “manage” some business interests.

The Californian building an ark in his back garden: Inventor claims ‘tsunamiball’ could survive any storm

Boat will kept on a high ‘perch’ in Palo Alto garden in case a tsunami hits Has enough room for an entire family In the event of a Tsunami, it simply floats with the wave Set to be rented out on Airbnb until needed

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci…..storm.html Hope he’s got all his permits in order. I can see some government asshole demanding he tear it down for not asking permission to build.

It actually floats! The world’s first 3D printed kayak that took 42 days to print… and it’s quite fetching too

Engineer Jim Smith built kayak using 28 printed sections of ABS plastic Sections fixed together with brass screws and sealed with silicone caulk Design was based on Siskiwit Bay kayak but modified for 3D printing The bill for the 3D kayak came to $500 – after 1013 hours of work

This Tyler Cowen attack is unsurprising but disturbing none the less. The left is getting violent and they are in power. How crazy are they going to get if they are kicked out of power in the next two years?

The worst part about it is that Cowen is hardly a household name. You have to be an economics/policy geek to even know who he is. If someone like Cowen is in danger, how much danger is someone like Thomas Sowell or Michelle Malkin in? One of the more nasty sneers directed at Sarah Palin is how she “quit as governor”. What is never mentioned is that the State of Alaska wouldn’t pay for her to have any personal security. It was going to bankrupt her to hire her own. She had nuts coming up to her door practically daily. Given what happened to Cowen yesterday, someone about 1/100th as known or as hated by the left as Palin, how could you blame her from walking away?

While the thought of some prog moron meeting his end trying something like this makes me happy, I have a feeling such a story would immediately be picked up by the media and shown as an example of “right wing violence”.

They have gone full fascist. Part of how fascists operate is to use physical violence and mob intimidation against their political enemies while using their propaganda machine to portray their opponents as the violent ones if the opponents ever try to fight back.

I don’t disagree, John. However at least there are alternative media sources increasingly available to people that want to seek out the truth. Those weren’t really available during the rise of fascism/communism in the 20s and 30s. Plus, in Europe at least, you had a largely disarmed population that was also (and still is) at least partly in thrall to state power/strongman mentality. While that is obviously also the case here with the progtard left, it isn’t the case everywhere.

Yes. America is (still thankfully) too big, too violent, and too well armed for paper hanging little bastards like our current Progs to ever really succeed. There were plenty of real fascists running around America in the 1930s. They just never got anywhere because if they had tried the shit the Nazis pulled in Germany, they would have gotten their asses kicked.

This is why the Progs want to disarm the country. People owning guns prevents them from using mob violence. Take away people’s guns and then what does someone do when the intellectual children of Bill Ayers show up with their little gang? Right now you point a shotgun out your front door and tell them good luck. Progs know this and hate it.

I have to think they just despise the Bill of Rights. The entire purpose of the BoR is to preserve, in very clear and straight language that is unmistakeable to anyone getting enough oxygen, the ability of the people to revolt against and replace thier government. I agree with you 100% that is why they are gradually disarming the country. Take away the ability to fight back (or at least make it a lot harder and riskier) and it is a lot easily to go full fascist on the population.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced Wednesday afternoon a settlement with Bank of America for about $9.33 billion. The deal will end litigation over the bad mortgages issued leading up to the financial crisis.

Hell, I stopped reading its crap long ago when it became clear that there was no intellectual content whatsoever. I hope it wastes its time responding to this comment since I will neve read that response nor care about it.

Service Consumers of the New Zealand Family Court have now begun covertly digitally recording Lawyers meetings, Counselling sessions, mediation sittings, and even Court room procedures, and uploading them to Youtube.

Convenor of http://www.nzfamilycourt.com Steve Taylor said that this was an overdue exercise in transparency, and that the practice would only grow over time.

“When an organisation such as the New Zealand Family Court acts in the manner of a corporate cult, deliberately insulating its people and practices from the public eye, and willingly practicing gross abuse of process and the law, Family Court Consumers harmed by this experience are eventually going to speak out publically, just as ex-cult members and families eventually speak out publically” said Mr Taylor.

Theoretically, the 6A should make Family Court proceedings in the US public.

We had a corporate meeting the other day – part of the news is the new company policy regarding tobacco usage. If you declare yourself as a non-tabacco user (and get the resulting cheaper insurance), you will can be randomly tested. This random testing also holds true for your spouse.

So in my case, my wife can be called in by my company to be tested (via a swab) for nicotine usage.

Of course I can see the reasons for doing so – since a minority will lie on the form and continue to smoke, but this method does seem awfully heavy-handed and not conducive to employee morale. eg – you trust me with millions of dollars of computer systems – but not enough to take my word on a form.

(note – I do smoke on a rare occasion but I’m definitely not a smoker)

And on a side note, I mentioned the above, blaming the coming nanny state. And one of my lib friends said it’s actually the result of small government and conservatives.

Yeah, fuck them and the whole anti-smoking nanny / Nazi state phenomenon.

You know, it presents difficulties for hard core anarchists like me. Take hotels, for instance.

As you know, there are many hotels which do not permit smoking. There is a real nice place in Stowe, Vermont at which my wife and I have stayed many times. The hotel requires patrons to sign a No-Smoking pledge at check-in. If the hotel determines that you have breached the pledge, your Visa is whacked for $250.00.

I have talked to the general manager of the resort and informed him that the policy sucks and is a by-product of the anti-smoking hysteria. He didn’t want to hear it.

My wife used to do fund raising at a private school. She wanted to set up a tent on a nice night in the fall and have Monday Night Football and cigar night. Have a fund raiser where parents could come and smoke cigars and drink and watch the game. She had a high end tobacco shop lined up as a sponsor. It was a great idea and would have raised a ton of money.

The school’s board got wind of the idea and threw a fit. They were a tobacco free campus and they didn’t want to set a bad example for the students. Pathetic.

But if you do smoke, what you do is complain after you check out/turn in rental car, that the guy before you must have smoked in the room/car, and that it was too much of a hassle to demand a new room/car, but they’d better clamp down on those idiots or you’re never coming back. Not that this is ethical or anything. But it can save you some bucks.

My stepdad’s restaurant went completely smoke free last year (smoke anywheresmoke at the bar/smoking sectiononly smoke at the bar). I was pretty adamant that he not do it but the pressure on the business was too great since we rely on tourist families and most of them come from places where non-smoking is the norm.

We had a corporate meeting the other day – part of the news is the new company policy regarding tobacco usage.

Does your company self-insure? Because that explains the change in policy. I get a $50 discount per payment period (to be more accurate, I don’t get penalized at the tune of $50 per payment period) if I say I am not a smoker – which I’m not – when preparing my benefits for the current year.

(note – I do smoke on a rare occasion but I’m definitely not a smoker)

That’s the part the scares me the most. The last sentence. There’s no way to rationally discuss things with them. Even if something is a progressive policy they’ll just blame the other side if it goes bad for whatever reason (s).

It’s almost as if you have to banish or quarantine these people outright.

Perhaps this sounds strange, but I would rather have them test everyone outright and decide the insurance rate based on that. The random testing – especially of the spouse – irks me. Or perhaps it’s the possibility of having my rate go up because I decide to have one cigar at a poker party, get hit by a random test a few days later, and then get marked as a smoker, even though that was the only tobacco product I had for months.

Also – warning: slippery slope argument ahead – I see this as part of a coming trend. For example, if overweight people – like smokers – consume more healthcare dollars, then I can see BMI being used to for rate changes. Or maybe cholesterol checks would be next.

It already is. My company gave an incentive (money back from insurance premiums) to have a medical screening and an additional bonus if you passed, or all your numbers were inside what they considered healthy ranges. My weight and waistline were inside the healthy ranges, but my BMI was high, so I didn’t get the bonus. I can only conclude that I’m too short for my own health.

Warty Hugeman has been President many times. He has ruled as King, Emperor, Tsar, Pharaoh and Caesar. He was the horse that sexed up on Catherine the Great. He held the sheet music while Nero fiddled. He had sex with a Pyramid.

The analysis we did with our navigator was an eye-opener. Not only did it show us a bevy of hidden costs like out-of-network charges, it confirmed the idea that we were getting a pretty good deal with our existing policy, although it will probably only be a bargain through this year.

What was vexing, though, wasn’t the trade-off between paying lower premiums in exchange for less-inclusive networks and higher out of pockets. It was the implicit “nudge” to get us to pay much more upfront ? up to $500 a month ? for a policy that would include our preferred doctors and hospitals.

President Obama visited Pope Francis at the Vatican. He said the pope’s message challenged him and others on economic and social issues, but focused his remarks largely on the former, where the two have more in common.

Yes. They’re both equally clueless on economic matters.

Senate Democrats worried about their party’s prospects in the November midterms are planning on introducing “principles” and legislation to fix Obamacare.

“Rand Paul’s nationwide organization, which counts more than 200 people, includes new backers who have previously funded more traditional Republicans, along with longtime libertarian activists. Paul, of Kentucky, has also been courting Wall Street titans and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who donated to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, attending elite conclaves in Utah and elsewhere along with other GOP hopefuls….

“In June, in a pilgrimage to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Paul spoke with the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and wrote a Patrick Henry-inspired social-media message ? “Give me liberty to post” ? on a hallway chalkboard.”

No one believes me but Paul is, in the words of the great Kentucky Fried Movie, building and army of incredible magnitude. His organization is miles ahead of any other Republican candidate. And unlike most of the rest of them, he has an actual following and constituency. If someone else doesn’t start getting serious, the GOP is not going to know what hit them.

I don’t know. He barely won in 2008, the biggest Democratic wave year in living memory. If he couldn’t win in a blowout then, how is he going to win at all in what appears to be a very bad year for the Democrats?

When we humans make a mistake, we have an instinctive “oops” reaction in our brains …. To examine what effect this mistake response has on our behavior, two psychologists … designed a cap that administers a low-level current to the brain to simulate the spike. They hypothesized that the spike plays a role in learning, allowing the brain to learn from mistakes.

“Students in the class itself were slow to react, because the course in session was on law and literature, and they were in the middle of a unit about vigilante justice, so the students assumed that the arrest was part of the class.”

I love it when the “for the children” approach to law making bites a progressive in the ass.

Here in Sunny Minnesota there is a push to legalize medical MJ “for the sick kids”. Our recovering(mostly)-medicated-for-depression liberal governor (Mark Dayton) is under fire for threatening to veto it.

Dayton is worried that he will lose the LEO voters if he approves it. He tried to propose a solution where there would be clinical trials at the Mayo before it could be legalized. The mothers with sick kids didn’t like that and Dayton told them that they could just “buy it off the street.” After all any amount under 1.5 oz is just a petty misdemeanor.

On the morning commute I was listening to a local radio station and they had a great clip of Dayton saying that “I have been told that in any city you can buy this stuff” and they should just do that. Can’t find a link to the actual audio.

As a Transportation Security Administration officer, Milka Overton’s job is to keep people safe. Yet on her way to work Monday, Overton found herself in danger aboard the CTA Blue Line train that crashed at O’Hare ? and she questions how the operator fell asleep at the wheel given that she had dozed off at work before.

“The very first time, she should have been fired or let go because you literally have people’s lives in your hands,” said Overton, who suffered an arm and shoulder injury when the train jumped the platform onto an escalator at 2:50 a.m. Monday.

———-

Overton and another passenger, Niakesha Thomas, have filed lawsuits in Cook County circuit court accusing the CTA of negligence.

What ever happened to workers’ solidarity?

That poor woman. Now she’ll retire on a fat TSA disability pension; she should thank the train driver when she wakes up.

[…][B]eginning January 1 retailers will have to charge customers who want them “an environmental fee” of five cents per bag, and they will get to keep 10 percent of that money. The ordinance also says retailers who want to keep handing out plastic and paper bags will have to register with the city and keep track of bags sold.

The city says the money raised from the bag fees will help go toward funding enforcement and education efforts that assistant city manager Jill Jordan told the council could cost around $250,000 and necessitate the hiring of up to 12 additional staff members.

But it’s never about stifling the competition like all those 99c stores and such – nah! How cynical of you! No! It’s all about saving the environment!

More proof that Progressives are animists. The feds have now made it illegal to sell anything with ivory in it. So anyone who has an antique object made of ivory is now screwed since they can’t prove it wasn’t new. The NYT runs a reasonably fair article about how stupid and unfair this is. The low sloped forehead crowd in the comment section chime in with this gem.

First, that some folks, who own ivory objects, can’t import them, export them or sell them, because they can’t prove they were legally taken, and that this is a sad thing for them because they have sentimental attachments to them. My response? Too bad. Those objects have the stench of death. This is why I had all those ivory keys on MY piano removed and destroyed. I did not want to touch those objects, once I was made aware of what they meant.

Ladies and Gentleman, here is primitive man posting on the internet. You cannot build an advanced civilization with people like that. We are going to end up back in caves if these people are not stopped.

Unlike the War On Drugs, the War On Ivory will actually be successful, but not in the way they intend. It will certainly eradicate ivory trading, as the animals have been rendered worthless to the locals who live there, while they’ve become even more valuable to poachers and smugglers. Bye-bye rhinos and elephants; you must be sacrificed on the altar of economic illiteracy and good intentions.

“The Kissi community eats bats and the epidemic is making a lot of devastation,” Moriba Traore, an inhabitant of Gueckedou, said by telephone. “Families in villages lost eight or ten members and people are dying. We are afraid.”

I have to say that I hope that the TSA doesn’t use Houston-Hobby as a model for training other airports. The people working the security lines were uniformly polite, quick, and professional. I almost didn’t mind the security theater.

I used to love going through security when I worked for the congressman. I’d show the TSA person my badge and skip everyone else. Douchey as hell I know but think of it this way, that many more people probably hate congressional staff. You’re welcome.

I could do that with my government ID but I refuse to. It just bugs me to no end that we have a Praetorian class in this country. I don’t care if I am one of the bottom members of it. I won’t support it.

The International Monetary Fund on Thursday pledged $18 billion in loans to prop up Ukraine’s sinking economy, as the nation’s prime minister forecast more pain ahead without reforms that will affect nearly everyone in the country.

In a lengthy and passionate address to parliament, Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned that Ukraine was “on the brink of the economic and financial bankruptcy” and laid out details for fixes needed to put the country back on track, including raising taxes, a freeze on minimum wage and radically higher energy prices.

The reforms will hit households hard, which is likely to severely dent the interim government’s tenuous hold on power.

I disagree. Receiving the scholarship isn’t what makes them employees, it’s the strings that come with it.

NLRB regional director Peter Sung Ohr cited the players’ time commitment to their sport and the fact that their scholarships were tied directly to their performance on the field as reasons for granting them union rights.

Ohr wrote in his ruling that the players “fall squarely within the [National Labor Relations] Act’s broad definition of ’employee’ when one considers the common law definition of ’employee.'”

Academic scholarship recipients essentially receive a 100% discount for a product they are purchasing. Athletes receive that product in exchange for services rendered; it’s employment compensation.

There’s strings on academic scholarships too. They require a particular GPA to maintain, so you’re still doing “work” for the university: You’re raising their prestige by bringing up their academic credentials. For that service, the university compensates you.

That’s not really work for the university. You’re using the product in the same manner as any other customer, but your discount is dependent upon you getting more from your purchase than others. If that counts as employment then anyone with a volume discount plan at Napa should count as one.

Part of the product of the university is access to its athletic programs. The athletic scholarship kids are getting a discount dependent on them getting more from their purchase than others.

I’m not the one arguing that athletes are employees. But if you consider them getting a scholarship to play sports well an employment contract, you have to consider a smart kid getting a scholarship to do school well an employment contract too. Maybe if schools at some point forbids walk-ons there will be a distinction you could try to make about what counts as part of the “product” the students are “purchasing”, but I still probably wouldn’t buy that.

A DEMOCRATIC state senator in California–who campaigned for gun control–was just arrested by the FBI for arms trafficking.

“SAN FRANCISCO — A California state senator who advocated gun control legislation asked for campaign donations in exchange for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker and told him how to get shoulder-fired automatic weapons and missiles from a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.

The allegations against state Sen. Leland Yee were outlined in an FBI affidavit in support of a criminal complaint. The affidavit accuses Yee of conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms. He was arrested Wednesday and appeared later in federal court, where bail was set at $500,000.”

Bonus LOL: He was anti-videogame as well. He was especially outspoken against Grand Theft Auto. And now he’s pretty much become a character in it. I hope the developers pay tribute to him in the next game.

Bonus Bonus LOL: The gangster he was doing favors for was nicknamed “Shrimp Boy”.

Holy shit. It is easy to forget just how bat shit crazy NOCAL is. SOCAL is full of idiot socialists. But NOCAL is a completely different breed of crazy. The area didn’t produce Altemont and Jim Jones for nothing.

CHARLOTTE — Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon, who has been in office less than six months, resigned Wednesday, just hours after he was arrested and accused of taking more than $48,000 in bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen who wanted to do work with North Carolina’s largest city.

Among other ideas, they called for allowing “copper” plans on the government-run health exchanges. The new insurance plans would offer lower premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs than the “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” options currently offered.

And this is how we will gut the law, and leave it standing in name only. Allow a bare-bones catestrophic coverage type plan on the exchange, and all the healthy young people will flock to it, and draw money away from the other insurance pools. Leaving only catestrophic coverage standing.

I predicted that the Democrats would be begging Republicans to help them gut the law, and it is happening.

Oh that statistic, the qualification to be a “project” in my office simply means that two ore more business groups are involved. Now if there were minimum budget numbers applied to these “projects” to be compared, that 53% would drop.

I think what drives developers crazy the most is the difference in the perception of the importance of time.

Most speculative development deals are split on the basis of an IRR function–which is extremely time sensitive. If it takes me twice as long, I lose a lot more than half of my revenue. If I do it twice as fast, I make a lot more than double!

And I’m working with people who can get things done on schedule 53% of the time and brag about it! Sometimes I think their perception of time is driven by their career motivations, like, “I have fifteen more years to put in before I get my full pension, and it’ll definitely be done before then”.

Several of the 28 EU nations regret their heavy dependence on Russian gas now that they are seeking to punish Moscow for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Obama showed his willingness to help with the EU’s energy quandary. “Once we have a trade agreement in place, export licenses for projects ? for liquefied natural gas destined to Europe ? would be much easier, something that’s obviously relevant in today’s geopolitical climate,” Obama said.

Currently, the EU imports more than a third of its gas from Russia and tapping into the plentiful supplies in the United States would alleviate a pressing problem.

As an example of how bad things are in New York for business, I recently saw a local dollar store with a going out of business sale – all items $0.75 (I am not kidding). Since they tend to do more business around upstate when things are bad (which is often these days) it makes me wonder how bad their overhead got and why.

I know that Obamacare is helping a great number of people. I understand that for the first time millions of people are getting health insurance. It’s the one thing that gives me solace.

But let’s not pretend that this new policy is the affordable health care savior that many of us were hoping for. For us, our new plan is a big financial hit for a product that does not make it any easier to get basic health care.

President Obama has released a statement “on the Section 215 Bulk Metadata Program,” saying that “Having carefully considered the available options, I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk.” The statement is released by the White House wile President Obama is in Rome.

“Earlier this year in a speech at the Department of Justice, I announced a transition that would end the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program as it previously existed and that we would establish a mechanism to preserve the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata. I did so to give the public greater confidence that their privacy is appropriately protected, while maintaining the tools our intelligence and law enforcement agencies need to keep us safe,” reads the statement.

People born from 1966 to 1980, known as Generation X, are fatter and twice as likely to have diabetes as Baby Boomers were at the same age, according to an Australian study that predicts younger generations will be sicker and costlier to care for in old age.

National health survey data were used to compare the groups at age 25 to 44 years. While Generation X was better educated and less likely to smoke, their prevalence of obesity was about 50 percent higher than recorded for Baby Boomers, born from 1946 to 1965, at the same age. For males especially, the trend corresponded with increased diabetes, researchers at the University of Adelaide, in South Australia, found.

I am starting to believe that something about our food changed that made people fat. I am old enough to remember the 70s. And people if anything exercised less back then. The running craze was still on the fringe, there was no such thing as a gym membership. Yet, look at the pictures and see how much thinner people were. I am sorry, I don’t think that is all about them being active and us being lazy. People laid in front of the television eating popcorn and chips back then too. There were only three channels plus PBS, but we didn’t know any better. Something else is going on.

The people I know who have the most trouble with their weight approach food emotionally. They eat the same kinds of foods as skinny people but they eat it for different reasons…boredom, depression, etc.

I think the portion sizes have really grown and people just expect they can eat that much.

I left the US over 20 years ago and when I go back my wife and I, when eating out, order one main and a side dish or two and share it. If we have two main dishes at lunch we won’t be hungry by dinertime.

I think the physical labor argument makes sense when you are looking at say the 30s. But I don’t think people in the 70s did much more physical labor than we do now. It is not like people were still down on the farm or something.

Being very hot or cold causes your body to burn excess calories to maintain proper core body temperature. Starting in the 1980’s Air Conditioning went from a rare luxury of the rich to something most people had reducing the calories they burned just sitting around on a daily basis

Kids raised before about 1975 had many fewer indoor pursuits – TV was limited, no videogames, no interwebs – so we played outside more. And there were far fewer ‘organized’ baseball, football, soccer, etc leagues, so we self-organized. Both of these developed different habits than what today’s kids develop. Those habits are hard to change.